-Name dropping: Dr. Phlox mentions the Nausicaans!Plus, the guest race in this epsiode are the Anxanar, and as a result of Hoshi they eventually get off on a good footing with them. The Axanar are androgynous and live around 400 years, by he way.

-Away missions (no offical term for it yet) are a really big deal. Lots of preparations go into it, and they tend to bring a lot of equipment over to accomplish their mission.

-And they use the shuttles to go there and back. Some sort of docking adapter is on the top on the ship, which rotates as necessary to attach to hatches and stuff. In this episode, they attach to the "top" of the ship to get in, and flip upside down. The shuttle has visible maneivering jets, too.

-Speaking of which, we see *why* the shuttlebay has two decks - you biard the shuttles throught the top, via a drop-down stair that extends to it! Pretty neat. Docking takes a bit of doing, and is a fragile process.

-The "plasma rifles" *are* apparently redresses of the Jem'Haddar rifles, themselves redresses of previous guest weapons. Oh well. The phase pistols have a top/front section that opens up like a revolver, and has a glowey power cell or something inside that can pop out.

-We see the armory this episode, which is probably one of two in the forward section. It features two loading cradles forward, with two tubes into which torpedoes are loaded. The four ports on the underside of the hull are the torpedo tubes. Aft, the torpedo is launched from the suspended pod(!). Whaddya know...

-The torpedoes themselves are long, metallic, pointed and with a pinched section in the middle. They're pretty slow when fired, and the episode is partly about getting them to target and explode properly. Even when they DO work, they still don't seem very powerful.

-This is part of what I am liking about this show - they seem to be clearly outmatched by other races thus far, and have to get out of situations by their wits instead of technobabble crap. Voyager, the E-D, and the E-nil tended to be on equal or greater footing with their antagonists tech -wise, or could use their tech to get out of situations. On the Pre-E, everything is experimental and realtively low-tech.

-The bad guys who were killing the Axanar are unknown, but come in a ship that looks like a Neitzchean fighter from "Andromeda". They have tractor beam technology but use boarding tubes a la later Vidiian episodes. They were killing the Axanar and extracting some compound for their own use. Finding the Pre-E, they start doing the same thing when another Axanar ship shows up to save them, after Hoshi learns their language.

-Speaking of which, this is mostly a Hoshi episode, focussing on her getting used to space travel and exploration. The clip we've seen of her screaming is actually a significant plot point: the first time aboard the ship, Hoshi freaks out when she sees the dead crew, and is really ashamed later about screaming "like a 12 year-old". She eventually gets through her crisis with the help of an obtuse metaphor involving a slug. Overall, not badly done.

Bah, that's enough. You guys fill in the rest tonight.

[ October 03, 2001: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]

As for name drops being useless. Well, let's take my favourites, the Breen. The entire culture was built-up in a series of little name drops here and there over six years.

And the Breen thing was awesome, because they kept threading it through. Although they did lose track of the original reference, which was that the Breen used disruptors ('Hero Worship' & 'Generations', but by the time we saw a Breen they had left phaser burns ('Indiscretion'). but i had fun figuring that out too

[ October 03, 2001: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]